Blog post by Diana Gomes and Anamaria Piloiu | The Eurosystem has accepted Scope as a new rating agency alongside Fitch, Moody's, S&P and DBRS. This has a number of implications, including a wider range of credit opinions and expertise being considered for monetary policy purposes. Credit rating agencies are private companies which assess the creditworthiness of issuers of financial instruments – be they governments, commercial banks or corporates. Many investors in the financial markets rely on rating agencies because...

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Leaders from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Energy; and the National Science Foundation; and the Chief Executive Officer of the National Center for the Advancement of Semiconductor Technology (Natcast) gathered at the White House to announce over $5 billion in expected investment in the CHIPS R&D program, including the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), and formally establish a public-private consortium for the NSTC. The announcement included hundreds of millions of dollars of expected investment in the semiconductor workforce;...

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Today, the European Union and the United States held the fifth meeting of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) in Washington, D.C. The meeting allowed ministers to take stock of the progress of the TTC's work and to provide political steer on key priorities for the next TTC Ministerial meeting, which will take place in Belgium in spring. The TTC is the main forum for close cooperation on transatlantic trade and technology issues. It was co-chaired by European Commission Executive Vice-President...

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On Tuesday, Parliament and Council negotiators reached a provisional deal on the Net-Zero industry Act to bolster EU production in technologies needed for decarbonisation. The "Net-Zero industry Act" sets a target for Europe to produce 40% of its annual deployment needs in net-zero technologies by 2030, based on National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) and to capture 15% of the global market value for these technologies. During negotiations, MEPs secured an approach based on a single list of technologies to be...

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